The Order of the Skull and Bones: Everything you always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask

15 of the Historically Most Powerful Members of Skull & Bones

By Kris Millegan

1. The Secret Origins of Skull & Bones

The story begins at Yale, where three threads of American social history — espionage, drug smuggling and secret societies — intertwine into one.

Elihu Yale was born near Boston, educated in London, and served with the British East India Company, eventually becoming governor of Fort Saint George, Madras, in 1687. He amassed a great fortune from trade and returned to England in 1699. Yale became known as quite a philanthropist; upon receiving a request from the Collegiate School in Connecticut, he sent a donation and a gift of books. After subsequent bequests, Cotton Mather suggested the school be named Yale College, in 1718.

A statue of Nathan Hale stands on Old Campus at Yale University. There is a copy of that statue in front of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yet another stands in front of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts (where George H.W. Bush (’48) went to prep school and joined a secret society at age twelve).

Nathan Hale, along with three other Yale graduates, was a member of the “Culper Ring,” one of America’s first intelligence operations. Established by George Washington, it was successful throughout the Revolutionary War. Nathan was the only operative to be ferreted out by the British, and after speaking his famous regrets, he was hanged in 1776. Ever since the founding of the Republic, the relationship between Yale and the “Intelligence Community” has been unique.

In 1823, Samuel Russell established Russell and Company for the purpose of acquiring opium in Turkey and smuggling it to China. Russell and Company merged with the Perkins (Boston) syndicate in 1830 and became the primary American opium smuggler. Many of the great American and European fortunes were built on the “China”(opium) trade.

One of Russell and Company’s Chief of Operations in Canton was Warren Delano, Jr., grandfather of Franklin Roosevelt. Other Russell partners included John Cleve Green (who financed Princeton), Abiel Low (who financed construction of Columbia), Joseph Coolidge and the Perkins, Sturgis and Forbes families. (Coolidge’s son organized the United Fruit company, and his grandson, Archibald C. Coolidge, was a co-founder of the Council on Foreign Relations.)

William Huntington Russell (’33), Samuel’s cousin, studied in Germany from 1831-32. Germany was a hotbed of new ideas. The “scientific method” was being applied to all forms of human endeavor. Prussia, which blamed the defeat of its forces by Napoleon in 1806 on soldiers only thinking about themselves in the stress of battle, took the principles set forth by John Locke and Jean Rosseau and created a new educational system. Johan Fitche, in his “Address to the German People,” declared that the children would be taken over by the State and told what to think and how to think it.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel took over Fitche’s chair at the University Of Berlin in 1817, and was a professor there until his death in 1831. Hegel was the culmination of the German idealistic philosophy school of Immanuel Kant.

To Hegel, our world is a world of reason. The state is Absolute Reason and the citizen can only become free by worship and obedience to the state. Hegel called the state the “march of God in the world” and the “final end”. This final end, Hegel said, “has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state.” Both fascism and communism have their philosophical roots in Hegelianism. Hegelian philosophy was very much in vogue during William Russell’s time in Germany.

When Russell returned to Yale in 1832, he formed a senior society with Alphonso Taft (’33). According to information acquired from a break-in to the “tomb” (the Skull and Bones meeting hall) in 1876, “Bones is a chapter of a corps in a German University…. General Russell, its founder, was in Germany before his Senior Year and formed a warm friendship with a leading member of a German society. He brought back with him to college, authority to found a chapter here.” So class valedictorian William H. Russell, along with fourteen others, became the founding members of “The Order of Scull and Bones,” later changed to “The Order of Skull and Bones”.

The secretive Order of Skull and Bones exists only at Yale. Fifteen juniors are “tapped” each year by the seniors to be initiated into next year’s group. Some say each initiate is given $15,000 and a grandfather clock. Far from being a campus fun-house, the group is geared more toward the success of its members in the post-collegiate world.

The family names on the Skull and Bones roster roll off the tongue like an elite party list — Lord, Whitney, Taft, Jay, Bundy, Harriman, Weyerhaeuser, Pinchot, Rockefeller, Goodyear, Sloane, Stimson, Phelps, Perkins, Pillsbury, Kellogg, Vanderbilt, Bush, Lovett and so on.

William Russell went on to become a general and a state legislator in Connecticut. Alphonso Taft was appointed U.S. Attorney General, Secretary of War (a post many “Bonesmen” have held), Ambassador to Austria, and Ambassador to Russia (another post held by many “Bonesmen”). His son, William Howard Taft (’87), is the only man to be both President of the United States and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

2. Secrets of the “Tomb”

The Order flourished from the very beginning in spite of occasional squalls of controversy. There was dissension from some professors, who didn’t like its secrecy and exclusiveness. And there was backlash from students, showing concern about the influence “Bones” was having over Yale finances and the favoritism shown to “Bonesmen.”

In October of 1873, Volume 1, Number 1, of The Iconoclast was published in New Haven. It was only published once and was one of very few openly published articles on the Order of Skull and Bones.

From The Iconoclast:

“We speak through a new publication. because the college press is closed to those who dare to openly mention ‘Bones’….

Out of every class Skull and Bones takes its men. They have gone out into the world and have become, in many instances, leaders in society. They have obtained control of Yale. Its business is performed by them. Money paid to the college must pass into their hands, and be subject to their will. No doubt they are worthy men in themselves, but the many, whom they looked down upon while in college, cannot so far forget as to give money freely into their hands. Men in Wall Street complain that the college comes straight to them for help, instead of asking each graduate for his share. The reason is found in a remark made by one of Yale’s and America’s first men: ‘Few will give but Bones men and they care far more for their society than they do for the college….’

Year by year the deadly evil is growing. The society was never as obnoxious to the college as it is today, and it is just this ill-feeling that shuts the pockets of non-members. Never before has it shown such arrogance and self-fancied superiority. It grasps the College Press and endeavors to rule it all. It does not deign to show its credentials, but clutches at power with the silence of conscious guilt.

To tell the good which Yale College has done would be well nigh impossible. To tell the good she might do would be yet more difficult. The question, then, is reduced to this — on the one hand lies a source of incalculable good — on the other a society guilty of serious and far-reaching crimes. It is Yale College against Skull and Bones!! We ask all men, as a question of right, which should be allowed to live?”

At first, the society held its meetings in hired halls. Then in 1856, the “tomb”, a vine-covered, windowless, brown-stone hall was constructed, where to this day the “Bonesmen” hold their “strange, occultish” initiation rites and meet each Thursday and Sunday.

On September 29, 1876, a group calling itself “The Order of File and Claw” broke into the Skull and Bones’ holy of holies. In the “tomb” they found lodge-room 324 “fitted up in black velvet, even the walls being covered with the material.” Upstairs was lodge-room 322, “the ‘sanctum sanctorium’ of the temple… furnished in red velvet” with a pentagram on the wall. In the hall are “pictures of the founders of Bones at Yale, and of members of the Society in Germany, when the chapter was established here in 1832.” The raiding party found another interesting scene in the parlor next to room 322.

From The Fall Of Skull And Bones:

“On the west wall, hung among other pictures, an old engraving representing an open burial vault, in which, on a stone slab, rest four human skulls, grouped about a fools cap and bells, an open book, several mathematical instruments, a beggar’s scrip, and a royal crown. On the arched wall above the vault are the explanatory words, in Roman letters, ‘We War Der Thor, Wer Weiser, Wer Bettler Oder, Kaiser?’ and below the vault is engraved, in German characters, the sentence; ‘Ob Arm, Ob Beich, im Tode gleich.’

The picture is accompanied by a card on which is written, ‘From the German Chapter. Presented by D. C. Gilman of D. 50’.”

Daniel Coit Gilman (’52), along with two other “Bonesmen,” formed a troika which still influences American life today. Soon after their initiation in Skull and Bones, Daniel Gilman, Timothy Dwight (’49) and Andrew Dickinson White (’53) went to study philosophy in Europe at the University of Berlin. Gilman returned from Europe and incorporated Skull and Bones as Russell Trust, in 1856, with himself as Treasurer and William H. Russell as President. He spent the next fourteen years in New Haven consolidating the order’s power.

Gilman was appointed Librarian at Yale in 1858. Through shrewd political maneuvering, he acquired funding for Yale’s science departments (Sheffield Scientific School) and was able to get the Morrill Land Bill introduced in Congress, passed and finally signed by President Lincoln, after being vetoed by President Buchanan.

This bill, “donating public-lands for State College for agriculture and sciences”, is now known as the Land Grant College Act. Yale was the first school in America to get the federal land scrip and quickly grabbed all of Connecticut’s share at the time. Pleased by the acquisitions, Yale made Gilman a Professor of Physical Geography.

Daniel was the first President of the University of California. He also helped found, and was the first president of, John Hopkins.

Gilman was first president of the Carnegie Institution and involved in the founding of the Peabody, Slater and Russell Sage Foundations.

His buddy, Andrew D. White, was the first president of Cornell University (which received all of New York’s share of the Land Grant College Act), U.S. Minister to Russia, U.S. Ambassador to Berlin and first president of the American Historical Association. White was also Chairman of the American delegation to the first Hague Conference in 1899, which established an international judiciary.

Timothy Dwight, a professor at Yale Divinity School, was installed as president of Yale in 1886. All presidents since, have been either “Bonesmen” or directly tied to the Order and its interests.

The Daniel/Gilman/White trio was also responsible for the founding of the American Economic Association, the American Chemical Society and the American Psychological Association. Through their influences on John Dewey and Horace Mann, this trio continues to have an enormous impact on education today.

3. Networks of Power

In his book America’s Secret Establishment, Antony Sutton outlined the Order of Skull and Bones’ ability to establish vertical and horizontal “chains of influence” that ensured the continuity of their conspiratorial schemes.

The Whitney-Stimson-Bundy links represent the “vertical chain”.

W. C. Whitney (’63), who married Flora Payne (of the Standard Oil Payne dynasty), was Secretary of the Navy. His attorney was a man named Elihu Root. Root hired Henry Stimson (’88), out of law school. Stimson took over from Root as Secretary of War in 1911, appointed by fellow Bonesman William Howard Taft. Stimson later became Coolidge’s Governor-General of the Philippine Islands, Hoover’s Secretary of State, and Secretary of War during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.

Hollister Bundy (’09) was Stimson’s special assistant and point man in the Pentagon for the Manhattan Project. His two sons, also members of Skull and Bones, were William Bundy (’39) and McGeorge Bundy (’40) — both very active in governmental and foundation affairs.

The two brothers, from their positions in the CIA, the Department of Defense and the State Department, and as Special Assistants to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, exercised significant impact on the flow of information and intelligence during the Vietnam “War.”

William Bundy went on to be editor of Foreign Affairs, the influential quarterly of the Council on Foreign Affairs (CFR). McGeorge became president of the Ford Foundation.

Another interesting group of “Bonesmen” is the Harriman/Bush crowd. Averil Harriman (’13), “Elder Statesman” of the Democratic Party, and his brother Roland Harriman (’17) were very active members. In fact, four of Roland’s fellow “Bonesmen” from the class of 1917 were directors of Brown Brothers, Harriman, including Prescott Bush (’17), George Bush’s dad.

Since the turn of the century, two investment bank firms — Guaranty Trust and Brown Brothers, Harriman — were both dominated by members of Skull and Bones. These two firms were heavily involved in the financing of Communism and Hitler’s regime.

Bonesman share an affinity for the Hegelian ideas of the historical dialectic, which dictates the use of controlled conflict — thesis versus anti-thesis — to create a pre-determined synthesis. A synthesis of their making and design, where the state is absolute and individuals are granted their freedoms based on their obedience to the state — a New World Order.

Funding and political maneuvering on the part of “Bonesmen” and their allies helped the Bolsheviks prevail in Russia. In defiance of federal laws, the cabal financed industries, established banks and developed oil and mineral deposits in the fledgling USSR

Later, Averil Harriman, as minister to Great Britain in charge of Lend-Lease for Britain and Russia, was responsible for shipping entire factories into Russia. According to some researchers, Harriman also oversaw the transfer of nuclear secrets, plutonium and U. S. dollar printing plates to the USSR

In 1932, the Union Banking Corporation of New York City had enlisted four directors from the (’17) cell and two Nazi bankers associated with Fritz Thyssen, who had been financing Hitler since 1924.

From George Bush; The Unauthorized Biography:

“President Franklin Roosevelt’s Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 [11/17/42] seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with Enemy Act. The order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news, Note #4 explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the Union Banking Corporation was run for the ‘Thyssen family’ of ‘Germany and/or Hungary’ — ‘nationals … of a designated enemy country.’

By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union Banking Corporation were legally ‘front men for the Nazis’, the government avoided the more important historical issue: In what way ‘were Hitler’s Nazis themselves hired, armed, and instructed by’ the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush was an executive manager? …

4. New York Times, December 16, 1944, ran a five-paragraph page 25 article on actions of the New York State Banking Department. Only the last sentence refers to the Nazi bank, as follows: ‘The Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway.’

The Times omitted the fact that the Union Banking Corporation had been seized by the government for trading with the enemy, and the fact that 120 Broadway was the address of the government’s Alien Property Custodian.”

After the war, Prescott went on to become a U. S. Senator from Connecticut and favorite golfing partner of President Eisenhower. Prescott claims responsibility for getting Nixon into politics and takes personal credit for bringing Dick on board as Ike’s running mate in 1952.

4. Name Roster of the Secret Establishment

There were so many “Yalies” in the OSS that Yale’s drinking tune, the “Whiffenpoof Song”, became an “unofficial” song of the OSS. Many in the OSS were “Bonesmen” or belonged to the other Yale senior societies.

Robert Lovett (’18), Harriman’s childhood friend, had been tapped into Skull & Bones by Prescott Bush’s cell of ’17 and was a director at Brown Brothers, Harriman.

Again, from George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography:

“On October 22, 1945, Secretary of War Robert Patterson created the Lovett Committee, chaired by Robert A. Lovett, to advise the government on the post-World War II organization of U.S. intelligence activities…. The new agency would ‘consult’ with the armed forces, but it must be the sole collecting agency in the field of foreign espionage and counterespionage. The new agency should have an independent budget, and its appropriations should be granted by Congress without public hearings. Lovett appeared before the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy on November 14, 1945…. Lovett pressed for a virtual resumption of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS)…. The CIA was established in 1947 according to the prescription of Robert Lovett, of Jupiter Island.”

Gaddis Smith, a history professor at Yale, said, “Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion.” And “Bonesman” have been foremost among the “spooks” building the CIA’s “haunted house.”

F. Trubee Davison (’18) was Director of Personnel at the CIA in the early years. Some of the other “Bonesmen” connected with the intelligence community are:

• Sloane Coffin, Jr. (’49)
• V. Van Dine (’49)
• James Buckley (’44)
• Bill Buckley (’50)
• Hugh Cunnigham (’34)
• Hugh Wilson (’09)
• Reuben Holden (’40)
• Charles R. Walker (’16)
• Yale’s ‘unofficial’ Secretary of War, Robert D. French (’10)
• Archibald MacLiesh (’15)
• Dino Pionzio (’50), CIA Deputy Chief of Station during Allende overthrow
• William and McGeorge Bundy
• Richard A. Moore (‘3?)
• Senator David Boren (’63)
• Senator John Kerry (’66)

…and, of course, George Herbert Walker Bush. Bush tapped Coffin, who tapped Buckley.

Some other prominent Bonesmen include:

• Henry Luce (’20), Time-Life
• John Thomas Daniels (’14), founder Archer Daniels Midland
• Gifford Pinchot (’89), President Theodore Roosevelt’s chief forester
• Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser (’96)
• Harold Stanley (’08), founder of Morgan Stanley, investment banker
• Alfred Cowles (’13), Cowles Communication
• Henry P. Davison (’20), senior partner Morgan Guaranty Trust
• Thomas Cochran (’04) Morgan partner
• Senator John Heinz (’31)
• Pierre Jay (’92), first chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
• George Herbert Walker, Jr. (’27), financier and co-founder of the NY Mets
• Artemus Gates (’18), President of New York Trust Company, Union Pacific, TIME, Boeing Company
• William Draper III (50), the Defense Department, UN and Import-Export Bank
• Dean Witter, Jr.(’44), investment banker
• Senator Jonathan Bingham (’36)
• Potter Stewart (’36), Supreme Court Justice
• Senator John Chaffe (’47)
• Harry Payne Whitney (’94), husband of Gertrude Vanderbilt, investment banker
• Russell W. Davenport (’23), editor Fortune Magazine, created Fortune 500 list
• Evan G. Galbraith (’50), Ambassador to France and Managing Director of Morgan Stanley
• Richard Gow (’55), president Zapata Oil
• Amory Howe Bradford (’34), husband of Carol Warburg Rothschild and general manager for the New York Times
• C. E. Lord (’49), Comptroller of the Currency
• Winston Lord (’59), Chairman of CFR, Ambassador to China and assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton administration

Ever since Nixon re-established America’s political relationship with China, many of our ambassadors to that country have been Bonesmen, including George Bush, the first Chief U. S. Liaison Officer to the Peoples Republic of China.

5. China and the Opium Wars

Why all this interest in China? Well, China, among other things, is one of the largest producers and users of opiates in the world.

For a while, in the 1800s, the Yankee Clippers in Connecticut and Massachusetts were the fastest ships on the ocean. Speed was crucial to the opium trade; whoever made the trip from Turkey/India to Macao/Hong Kong/Shanghai first got the most for their goods.

During the Opium Wars, the U.S. chose to stand on the sidelines and cheer for the English and French, knowing that treaty obligations would bring the U.S. a share in the spoils. Russell and Company was at times the only trading house operating in Canton and used the opportunity to developed strong commercial ties and handsome profits.

Powerful national interests were behind the drug trade, because American traders were badly in need of some article the Chinese would buy, since by this time the seal breeding grounds had been nearly wiped out. If the Chinese had not bought opium from Americans, then United States imports of silk, porcelain and tea would have to paid in precious coin, which was in short supply. In 1843, when the Port of Shanghai was opened, Russell and Co. was one of its earliest traders.

In 1903, Yale Divinity School set up a program of schools and hospitals in China. Mao Zedong was among the staff. During the intrigues of China in the 1930s and ’40s, American intelligence called upon the resources of “Yale in China”, and George Bush’s cousin and fellow “Bonesman” Reuben Holden.

After stints as UN Ambassador and Chairman of the Republican National Committee for the beleaguered Richard Nixon, George Bush was sent to look after the “China trade”. The Bush family is still very much involved in the economic activities of “Red” China.

Many researchers contend that George Bush has been with CIA since the early 1950s, and that one of his jobs was to consolidate and co-ordinate the worldwide narcotics industry, the largest industry on Earth. Some say that one of the reasons behind the Vietnam “Police Action” was a cover for the consolidation of the “Golden Triangle”.

6. The War on Drugs: An “Intellectual Fraud”

Before the Vietnam “War”, the Golden Triangle was run by French Intelligence and Corsican mobsters. After the French bailed out and America moved in, the triangle was run by U.S. intelligence, with aid from Sicilian mobsters. This narcotics network is well documented in The Politics of Heroin in S. E. Asia by Alfred McCoy, The Great Heroin Coup by Henrik Kruger and Double-Cross by Sam and Chuck Giancana.

Vice-President George Bush, as Chairman of President Reagan’s cabinet-level working group and as Director of the National Narcotics Interdiction System, was the highest U. S. governmental official involved in the “war on drugs”.

Frances Mullen, Jr., former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), called Bush’s efforts “an intellectual fraud” and “a liability rather than an asset”. Soon after these statements, Mullen resigned and the resultant General Accounting Office (GAO) report was buried.

In July, 1985, the suppressed GAO paper reported that there were “no benefits from the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System, directed by George Bush. In fact, the overall effect was to encourage supply….”

Monika Jensen-Stevenson, a 60 Minutes producer, quit her job after the CBS news program refused to air the story she had uncovered relating to the covert drug trade. Her book, Kiss The Boys Goodbye, details how our intelligence community used the apparatus of the POW/MIA governmental agencies as a cover for the trafficking of opiates from the Golden Triangle.

President Reagan appointed Reform Party founder and Texas billionaire Ross Perot to the President’s Advisory Council on Foreign Intelligence. Reagan made Perot a special presidential investigator, looking into America’s POW and MIAs from the Vietnam “War”.

Ross took the job to heart and spent considerable time and money in pursuit of the quest. He was given special clearance and access. He asked questions and interviewed everyone he could find.

From Kiss The Boys Goodbye:

“Relations between Bush and Perot had gone downhill ever since the Vice-President had asked Ross Perot how his POW/MIA investigations were going.

‘Well, George, I go in looking for prisoners,’ said Perot, ‘but I spend all my time discovering the government has been moving drugs around the world and is involved in illegal arms deals…. I can’t get at the prisoners because of the corruption among our own people.’

This ended Perot’s official access to the highly classified files as a one-man presidential investigator. ‘I have been instructed to cease and desist,’ he had informed the families of missing men early in 1987.”

The wholesale importation of cocaine into the U.S. during “Iran/Contra” is also well documented. George Bush, is known “to be in the loop” with many of the players keeping in contact directly with his office.

Also, there has been much speculation as to the use of the off-shore rigs, pipelines and other assets of Zapata Offshore being used for narcotic trans-shipments.

Narcotics such as cocaine and heroin cannot be manufactured without the precursor chemicals. One of the largest makers of these precursor chemicals is the Eli Lilly Company of Indianapolis, Indiana. The Quayle family is a large stockholder, and George Bush has been on the Board of Directors. Eli Lilly is also the company that first synthesized LSD for the CIA.

7. George Bush, Skull & Bones and the JFK Assassination

Rodney Stich’s book Defrauding America tells of a “deep-cover CIA officer” assigned to a counter-intelligence unit, code-named Pegasus. This unit “had tape-recordings of plans to assassinate Kennedy” from a tap on the phone of J. Edgar Hoover. The people on the tapes were “[Nelson] Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, [Lyndon] Johnson of Texas, George Bush and J. Edgar Hoover.”

Could George Bush be involved in the JFK assassination?

In 1963, Bush was living in Houston, busily carrying out his duties as president of the Zapata Offshore oil company. He denied the existence of a note sent by the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover to “Mr. George Bush of the CIA.” When news of the note surfaced, the CIA first said they never commented on employment questions, but later relented said yes, a “George Bush” was mentioned in the note, but that it was “another” George Bush, not the man who took office in the White House in 1988.

Some intrepid reporters tracked down the “other” George Bush and discovered that he was just a lowly clerk who had shuffled papers for the CIA for about six months. He never received any interagency messages from anybody at the FBI, let alone the Queen Mary.

It is also worth noting that a CIA code word for Bay of Pigs was Operation Zapata, and that two of the support vessels were named Barbara and Houston.

Many say that George Bush was high up on the CIA ladder at the time, running proprietorial vehicles and placed in a position of command, responsible for many of the Cubans recruited into “service” at the time. All through the Iran-Contra affair, Felix Rodriguez, the man who captured and had Che Guevara killed for the CIA, always seemed to call Bush’s office first.

From The Realist (Summer, 1991):

“Bush was working with the now-famous CIA agent, Felix Rodriguez, recruiting right-wing Cuban exiles for the invasion of Cuba. It was Bush’s CIA job to organize the Cuban community in Miami for the invasion…. A newly discovered FBI document reveals that George Bush was directly involved in the 1963 murder of President John Kennedy. The document places marksmen by the CIA. Bush at that time lived in Texas. Hopping from Houston to Miami weekly, Bush spent 1960 and ’61 recruiting Cubans in Miami for the invasion….

George Bush claims he never worked for the CIA until he was appointed Director by former Warren Commission director and then president Jerry Ford in 1976. Logic suggests that is highly unlikely. Of course, Bush has a company duty to deny being in the CIA. The CIA is a secret organization. No one ever admits to being a member. The truth is that Bush has been a top CIA official since before the 1961 invasion of Cuba, working with Felix Rodriguez. Bush may deny his actual role in the CIA in 1959, but there are records in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that expose Bush’s role…”

On the Watergate tapes, June 23, 1972, referred to in the media as the ‘smoking gun’ conversation, Nixon and his Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, were discussing how to stop the FBI investigation into the CIA Watergate burglary. They were worried that the investigation would expose their connection to ‘the Bay of Pigs thing.’ Haldeman, in his book The Ends of Power, reveals that Nixon always used code words when talking about the 1963 murder of JFK. Haldeman said Nixon would always refer to the assassination as ‘the Bay of Pigs’.

On that transcript we find Nixon discussing the role of George Bush’s partner, Robert Mosbacher, as one of the Texas fundraisers for Nixon. On the tapes Nixon keeps referring to the ‘Cubans’ and the ‘Texans.’ The ‘Texans’ were Bush, Mosbacher and Baker. This is another direct link between Bush and evidence linking Nixon and Bush to the Kennedy assassination.

8. Motives for the Conspiracy

So, why would an intelligence agency/secret society want to smuggle drugs and assassinate JFK?

Well, they make a lot of money, and they garner intelligence assets through their participation. There’s also the rationale that the world is a seamy and unseemly place, and if you’re going to be the ‘big boy’ on the block, you better know what’s going on. And what better way of knowing than by running it yourself? There are also some who theorize that the covert drug trade fits with plans to destabilize American families and society. Through demoralizing and fracturing the body politic, they can impose their will using psychological warfare and the political alchemy of the Hegelian dialectic.

James Shelby Downard’s article, Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism, an underground classic, links American historical events with a wild, numerological, grand occult plan “to turn us into cybernetic mystery zombies”. The assassination of JFK, this article contends, was the performance of a public occult ritual called The Killing of the King, designed as a mass-trauma, mind-control assault against our U.S. national body-politic.

During Operation Sunrise, Operation Blowback, Operation Paperclip and others, thousands of Nazi scientists, researchers and administrators were brought to the United States after World War II. Many were “smuggled” into the country against direct, written, orders from President Harry S. Truman.

Project Monarch was the resumption of a mind-control project called Marionette Programming, which started in Nazi Germany. The basic component of the Monarch Program is the sophisticated manipulation of the mind, using extreme trauma to induce Multiple Personality Disorder.

Mr. Downward feels that the perpetrators purposefully murdered JFK in such a way as to affect our National identity and cohesiveness — to fracture America’s soul. Even the blatancy of their conspiracy was designed to show “their superiority” and “our futility”.

There have been studies that show a correlation between the JFK assassination and the rise in violence in society, distrust of government and other extensions of social ills.

9. The Illuminati: Subverting the Body Politic

Why this attack against our body politic?

In 1785, a bolt of lightning struck a courier en route to Paris from Frankfort-on-the-Main. A tract written by Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati, Original Shift in Days of Illuminations, was recovered from the dead messenger, containing the secret society’s long-range plan for “The New World Order through world revolution”.

The Bavarian Government outlawed the society and in 1787 published the details of The Illuminati conspiracy in The Original Writings of the Order and Sect of the Illuminati.

In Adam Weishaupt’s own words:

“By this plan, we shall direct all mankind in this manner. And, by the simplest means, we shall set all in motion and in flames. The occupations must be so allotted and contrived that we may, in secret, influence all political transactions.”

There is disagreement among scholars as to whether or not the Illuminati survived its banishment. Nevertheless, the group had been quite successful in attracting members and had allied itself with the extensive Masonic networks.

The Illuminati was publicly founded May 1, 1776 at the University of Ingolstadt by Weishaupt, Professor of Canon Law. It was a very “learned” society; Weishaupt drew the earliest members of his new order from among his students.

On December 5, 1776, students at William and Mary College founded a secret society, Phi Beta Kappa. A second chapter was formed, at Yale, in 1780. The anti-Masonic movement in the United States during the 1820s held groups such as Phi Beta Kappa in a bad light. Because of pressure, the society went public. This is noted by some researchers as the direct cause of the appearance of Yale’s Order of Skull and Bones.

In The Cyclopedia Of Fraternities, a genealogical chart of general Greek-Letter college fraternities in the United States, shows Phi Beta Kappa as “the parent of all the fraternal systems in [American] higher education.” There is only one “side” lineal descendant: the Yale chapter of 1780. The line then continues to Skull and Bones in 1832, and on through the other “only at Yale” senior societies, Scroll & Key and Wolf’s Head.

Phi Beta Kappa is the “first three Greek letters, for ‘Philosophia Biou Kubernetes’ or ‘Love of wisdom, the helmsman of life’.” A skull homophone is scull, a quick, gliding boat and part of Skull & Bones first nomenclature.

John Robison, a professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh University in Scotland and a member of a Freemason Lodge, said that he was asked to join the Illuminati. After study, he concluded the purposes of the Illuminati were not for him.

In 1798, he published a book called Proofs Of A Conspiracy:

“An association has been formed for the express purpose of rooting out all the religious establishments and overturning all the existing governments…. the leaders would rule the World with uncontrollable power, while all the rest would be employed as tools of the ambition of their unknown superiors.”

Proofs of A Conspiracy was sent to George Washington. Responding to the sender of the book with a letter, the president said he was aware the Illuminati were in America. He felt that the Illuminati had “diabolical tenets” and that their object was “a separation of the People from their government.”

In Proofs Of A Conspiracy, Robison printed the ceremony of initiation of the “Regent degree” in Illuminism. In it “a skeleton is pointed out to him [the initiate], at the feet of which are laid a crown and a sword. He is asked ‘whether that is the skeleton of a king, nobleman or a beggar.’ As he cannot decide, the president of the meeting says to him, ‘The character of being a man is the only one that is importance'”.

This is, essentially, the same as the writing in the Skull & Bones “tomb”:

“Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, Bettler oder Kaiser? Ob Arm, ob Reich, im Tode gleich.”

Which reads:

“Who was the fool, who the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all’s the same in death.”

10. Skull & Bones = Illuminati?

Is the Order of the Skull & Bones part of the Illuminati?

When a person is initiated into Skull & Bones, they are given a new name, similar to the practice of the Illuminati. And many recorded Illuminati members can be shown to have contact and/or strong influences with many of the professors that taught “Bonesmen” in Berlin.

When a secret society conspires against the sovereignty of a king, they need to organize, raise funds, make their plans operational, and hopefully bring them to fruition.

Could we have in the United States a secret society that has used the “National Security State” as a cover for their nefarious plans?

From George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography:

“That September [1951], Robert Lovett replaced Marshall as secretary of defense. Meanwhile, Harriman was named director of the Mutual Security Agency, making him the U.S. chief of the Anglo-American military alliance. By now, Brown Brothers, Harriman was everything but commander-in-chief.

A central focus of the Harriman security regime in Washington (1950-53) was the organization of covert operations and ‘psychological warfare.’ Harriman, together with his lawyers and business partners, Allen and John Foster Dulles, wanted the government’s secret services to conduct extensive propaganda campaigns and mass-psychology experiments within the U.S.A., and paramilitary campaigns abroad….

The Harriman security regime created the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) in 1951. The man appointed director of the PSB [was] Gordon Gray…. Gordon’s brother, R.J. Reynolds chairman Bowman Gray Jr., was also a naval intelligence officer, known around Washington as the ‘founder of operational intelligence.’ Gordon Gray became a close friend and political ally of Prescott Bush; and Gray’s son became for Prescott’s son, George, his lawyer and the shield of his covert policy.”

So you have the Whitney/Stimson/Bundy clan and the Harriman/Bush boys wielding a tremendous amount of influence on the political, economic and social affairs of America and the world. Then you have Prescott Bush’s buddy Richard Nixon as an activist vice-president. Then, a nation-chilling assassination, some time under LBJ with the Bundy boys keeping things in line, then Nixon as President with “Bonesmen” aides Ray Price (’51) and Richard A. Moore. Some time out for a Trilateralist-Democrat-patsy president, followed by Prescott’s son as an activist vice-president under Reagan. Next, we get a Skull and Bones president who declares a “New World Order” while beating up on his business partner, Saddam Hussein.

After twelve years of Republican administrations, Bush passes the reins to his drug smuggling buddy from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who studied at Yale Law School. According to some researchers, Clinton was recruited as a CIA operative while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Could this be the “old Hegelian historical dialectic process”?

11. World History: Plan or Accident?

Will we get another failed Democratic administration? A scandal as disgraceful as Nixon’s fall? When Robert P. Johnson (William Barr) told Clinton in a bunker in Arkansas that “you are our fair-haired boy, but you do have competition for the job you seek. We would never put all our eggs in one basket. You and your state have been our greatest asset…. Mr. Casey wanted me to pass on to you, that unless you fuck up and do something stupid, you are number one on our short list for shot at the job you always wanted.

So, you have William Casey — CIA Director, George Bush’s campaign manager and Sovereign Knight of Malta — speaking through the proxy of George Bush’s last Attorney General to George’s rival in the 1992 federal elections. Is it all just a show and sham for U.S. hoi polloi?

Perhaps so, if there exists the type of control over the electoral process as told by Mae Brussell and the suppressed book VoteScam, written by Jim and Ken Collier:

“…Your vote and mine may now be a meaningless bit of energy directed by preprogrammed computers-which can be fixed to select certain pre-ordained candidates and leave no footprints or paper trail.”

In short, computers are covertly stealing your vote.

For almost three decades the American vote has been subject to government-sponsored electronic theft.

The vote has been stolen from you by a cartel of federal “national security” bureaucrats, who include higher-ups in the Central Intelligence Agency, political party leaders, Congressmen, co-opted journalists — and the owners and managers — of the major Establishment news media, who have decided in concert that how America’s votes are counted, by whom they are counted and how the results are verified and delivered to the public is, as one of them put it, ‘Not a proper area of inquiry.’

By means of an unofficial private corporation named News Election Service (NES), the Establishment press has actual physical control of the counting and dissemination of the vote, and it refuses to let the public know how it is done.”

Is the American electorate subjected to cyclic propaganda, pre-selected candidates and winners, and psychological warfare to alienate Americans from the institutions established to serve them by the Constitution? Are the Democratic and Republican National Parties used for a Hegelian experiment in controlled conflict?

Pamela Churchill Harriman, Averil’s wife, is one of the Democratic Party’s biggest fund-raisers. She once gave Bill a job as director of her “PAM PAC” when he was defeated for governor in 1980. Bill paid her back by appointing her as Ambassador to France.

Another Harriman/Bush friend, Eugene Stetson (’34), was an assistant manager for Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers, Harriman’s New York office. He organized the H. Smith Richardson Foundation. The foundation, in the late 1950s, participated in the MKULTRA, the CIA’s domestic covert psychological warfare operation. The Richardson Foundation helped to finance the testing of psychotropic drugs, including LSD, at Bridgewater Hospital in Massachusetts, the center of some of the most brutal MK-ULTRA experiments.

During the Iran-Contra operations, the H. Smith Richardson Foundation was a “private donors steering committee,” working with the National Security Council to co-ordinate the Office of Public Diplomacy. This was an effort to propagandize in favor of and run cover for the Iran-Contra operations, and to coordinate published attacks on opponents of the program.

The H. Smith Richardson Foundation also runs the Center for Creative Leadership at Langley to “train leaders of the CIA,” as well as another center near Greensboro, North Carolina, that trains CIA and Secret Service Agents. Almost everyone who achieves the military rank of general also gets this training.

This is just the tip of an iceberg. You also have eugenics and population control, suppressed history and technology, yearly retreats, profitable partnerships with brutal dictators, deals with “terrorists”, the involvement of the Knights of Malta, war-mongering and profiteering, mind-control, secret societies for teens, ritual magic and more — all spinning the dark threads in the web of conspiracy that our spinning blue ball has gotten caught in.

We’ve got a whole new crop of “Bonesmen” coming up, including George H.W. Bush’s son George W. Bush (’68), Governor of Texas.

When Don Schollander (’68), the Olympic gold-medalist and only known Skull and Bones member living in Portland, was contacted by Willamette Week reporter John Schrang regarding his involvement in the Order, he said, “It’s really something I can’t talk about.”

Not wouldn’t, but “couldn’t”.

In wake of Antony Sutton’s first ground-breaking exposes of the Order, the Sterling Library at Yale has refused to allow any other researchers access to the Russell Trust papers.

Daniel Gilman, like most Bonesmen, makes no mention of Skull & Bones or the Russell Trust in his memoirs or biographies.

So, are we all just ‘fodder” for a secret society with satanic overtones that is attempting to form a one world government with themselves at the helm? Or is the Order of Skull and Bones just a bunch of frat boys from Yale? Wanna bet your future on it?

© Copyright Little Red Hen, 1996

References

George Bush:

• George Bush; The Unauthorized Biography Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin
• Two Faces of George Bush By Anthony C. Sutton Wiswell Ruffin House 1988
• George Bush: An Intimate Portrait By Fitzhugh Green Hippocrene Books
• The Immaculate Deception: The Bush Crime Family Exposed By Russell S. Bowen (ret. Brigadier General, U. S. Army) America West Publishers 1991
• Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA — How the Presidency was Co-opted by the CIA By Terry Reed & John Cummings Spi Books 1994
• The Mafia, C.I.A. & George Bush: Corruption, Greed and Abuse of Power in the Nation’s Highest Office — The Untold Story Of America’s Greatest Financial Debacle By Pete Brewton SPI Books 1992
• The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era By Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott & Jane Hunter South End Press 1987
• October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan By Gary Slick Times Books , Random House 1991
• The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History Editors – Peter Kornbluh & Malcom Byrne The New Press 1993
• For Operation Zapata – The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-63 By Michael R. Beschloss Edward Burlingame Books 1991

Names of the ships at the Bay of Pigs:

• La Batalla de Giron By Quintin Pino Machado
• La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales 1983. This source quotes one ship as the Barbara J. According to Quintin Pino Machado, the Houston had been given the new name of Aguja (Swordfish) and the Barbara that of Barracuda for the purposes of this operation.
• Bay of Pigs, The Untold Story By Peter Wyden Simon and Schuster 1979. This book also mentions the Barbara J.

Skull and Bones – Secret Societies:

• An Introduction to the Order By Anthony Sutton Veritas publishing 1988
• America’s Secret Establishment: An introduction to The Order of Skull & Bones By Anthony Sutton Liberty House 1986
• A Brief History of the Skull & Bones Society at Yale University By John Lawerence Private Paper 1991
• The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones By Ron Rosenbaum Esquire Magazine, September, 1977
• Yale Society Resists Peeks Into Its Crypt By David W. Dunlap New York Times, 11/4/88
• Skull and Bones — Bush’s Boy’s Club By Peggy Alder-Robohm (researcher) Covert Action Quarterly No. 33 (Winter 1990)
• Skeleton in His Closet By John Schrag Willamette Week, September 19-25, 1991
• The Cyclopedia Of Fraternities By Albert Stevens, ed. E. B. Treat and Company 1907
• The Philosophy of Right (1821), The Philosophy of History By Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Great Books, Encyclopedia Brittanica 1952
• Life of the Party: The Biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman By Christopher Ogden Little and Brown and Company 1994
• Who’s Who of the Elite By Robert Gaylon Ross, Sr. RIE 1995
• Youth from Every Quarter: A Bicentennial History Of Phillips Academy, Andover By Frederick S. Allis, Jr. Phillips Academy 1979
• The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made By Walter Issacson & Evan Thomas Simon & Schuster, Touchstone Books 1988
• Born of the Blood By John Robison
• Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare By Michael Hoffman II Wiswell Ruffin House 1989/1992
• The Occult Conspiracy: Secret Societies — Their Influence and Power in World History By Michael Howard Destiny Books 1989
• The Sword and the Grail: Of The Grail and the Templars and a True Discovery of America By Andrew Sinclair Crown Publishers 1992

CIA and Intelligence:

• Cloak & Gown: Scholars of the Secret War, 1939-1961 By Robin W. Winks William Morrow, Quill Edition 1987
• OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency By R. Harris Smith University of California 1972
• Defrauding America: A Pattern Of Related Scandals — Dirty Secrets Of The CIA And Other Government Operations By Rodney Stich Diablo Western Press 1993
• The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the U.S. and the World By Fletcher Prouty Prentice Hall 1973
• The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money & the CIA By Jonathan Kwitney Norton 1987
• Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover By Anthony Summers Pocket Star Books 1993/1994

Drug Trafficking:

• Kiss The Boy’s Goodbye: How The United States Betrayed It’s Own POWs In Vietnam By Monika Jensen Stevens & William Stevenson Plume 1991
• The Chinese Opium Wars By Jack Breeching Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1975
• Dope, Inc.: The Book that Drove Kissenger Crazy By the Editors of Executive Intelligence Review Executive Intelligence Review 1992
• The Proper Bostonians By Cleveland Amory E. P. Dutton 1947
• The Politics of Heroin in S.E. Asia By Alfred McCoy Harper & Row 1991
• The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism By Henrik Kruger South End Press 1980
• Double Cross: The Explosive, Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America By Sam & Chuck Giancana Warner Books 1992
• The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War By Peter Dale Scott Bobbs-Merril 1972
• The Soong Dynasty By Sterling Seagrave Harper & Row Perennial Library 1986
• America’s Secret Aristocracy By Stephen Bingham Berkley Books 1990
• The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation that Exposed the CIA Sabotage of the Drug War By Michael Levine Thunder’s Mouth Press 1993
• Agency of Fear By Edward Jay Epstein Verso 1990
• Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration’s Secret War in Nicaragua, the Illegal Bombs Pipeline, and the Contra Drug Connection By Leslie Cockburn Little Brown 1987
• The Guns ‘n’ Drugs Reader By various authors Prevailing Winds Research 1991
• Contrabandista! By Evert Clark & Nicholas Hoorock Preger 1973
• Blacklisted News, Secret History: from Chicago, ’68 to 1984 By The New Yippie Book Collective Bleecker Publishing 1983
• Storming Heaven: LSD and The American Dream By Jay Stevens Harper Row 1987

JFK Assassination:

• Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas & Hidden History By Jim Kieth, ed. Feral House 1993
• The Role of Richard Nixon and George Bush in the Assassination of President Kennedy By Paul Kangas The Realist, Summer 1991
• Treason For My Daily Bread By Mikhail Lebedev Vallancey Press 1977
• Hired To Kill Oswald And Prevent The Assassination Of JFK: Richard Case Nagell Is — The Man Who Knew Too Much By Dick Russell Carroll & Graf 1992
• The Torbitt Document: Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal (1970) By William Torbitt (David Copeland?) Prevailing Winds Research 1991

Nazis & Communism:

• Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party By Russ Bellant South End Press 1989,1990,1991
• The Borman Brotherhood By William Stevenson HBJ 1973 NY
• American Swastika: The Shocking Story of Nazi Collaborators in Our Midst from 1933 to the Present Day By Charles Higham Doubleday and Co, 1985
• Operation Sunrise By Bradley F. Smith & Elena Agarossi Basic Books 1979
• Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientist and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 By Linda Hunt St. Martin’s Press, 1991
• Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 By Charles Higham Delacorte Press 1983
• Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution By Antony Sutton Arlington House 1974
• Conspiracy, Mind Control & The New World Order: A Nation Of Sheep By William Lederer W.W. Norton 1961
• Who Rules America? A Century of Invisible Government By John McConaughy Longmans, Green and Co. 1934
• New World Order: The Ancient Plan of Secret Societies By William Still Hunington House 1990
• Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time By Carroll Quigley Macmillan Company 1966
• The Secret life of Ronald Reagan By Larry Flynt & Donald Freed Prevailing Winds Research 1991
• Architects Of Conspiracy: An Intriguing History By William P. Hoar Western Islands 1984
• Trance Formation Of America By Cathy O’Brien & Mark Phillips Global Trance Formation Info Ltd. 1995
• Casebook On Alternative 3: UFO’s Secret Societies and World Control By Jim Keith Illuminet Press 1994
• Millennium: Peace, Promises, and the Day They Take Our Money Away By Texe Marrs Living Truth Publishers 1990
• The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska By John DeCamp AWT, Inc. 1992
• Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes: From JFK to the CIA Terrorist Connection By Jonathan Vankin Paragon House 1992 Dell edt
• Witness To A Century By George Seldes Ballantine Books 1987
• The Power Elite By C. Wright Mills Oxford University Press 1956